Key players in the Canadian post biz have recently spent major dollars building a high-definition-enabled infrastructure, acquiring systems such as the da Vinci 2K color corrector and Quantel’s iQ. But while this cutting-edge gear no doubt impresses visiting clients, is there enough HD work at present to justify these costly investments?

Surely the pace at which widespread HD adoption is crawling frustrates these shops. The recent economic downturn might delay the changeover to mandatory HD broadcast, slated for 2006 for U.S. TV stations, with Canadian counterparts to follow suit some 18 months to two years later. In these recessed times, broadcasters will likely put off the expensive HD gear overhaul.

Meanwhile, the stalemate among theatre owners and studios in terms of who will pay to replace film projectors with digital ones continues to impede HD’s exhibition benefits, which include the bypass of print making and print delivery. Until these issues are resolved, movie producers can only take advantage of capturing digitally – meaning, no negative stock. But to reach a wide theatrical audience in the foreseeable future, projects originated on HD and comparable formats will have to be transferred to 35mm film.

This was the situation facing Tortilla Soup, a Samuel Goldwyn Films indie with an estimated budget of US$5 million, released through IDP Distribution on 200 screens in more than 20 U.S. markets. (It will be released in Canada by Sony.) The film, directed by Maria Ripoll (Twice Upon a Yesterday) and starring Hector Elizondo and Raquel Welch, is a remake of Ang Lee’s 1994 Taiwanese film Eat Drink Man Woman, transplanting the story of a master chef living with his three unmarried daughters to an Hispanic-American setting.

Looking to minimize production costs, the producers had director of photography Xavier Perez Grobet (Before Night Falls) shoot the feature on the Panasonic 480p AJ-PD900WA DVCPRO50 camcorder, considered a sub-HD format. Little had been done in terms of transferring the format to 35mm, and so Samuel Goldwyn Films hired Manny Pereira, a Toronto-based post picture supervisor specializing in HD, to investigate the process. He ran tests at various L.A. post facilities.

‘Part of the test was to see who could cine-compress [480p’s] 60-frames-per-second material down to [film’s] 24 fps,’ Pereira explains. ‘What was crucial was how motion looked, because 60 fps looks like video and 24 fps is what we’re used to from years of watching movies in theatres. We often see artifacts when video images get transposed onto film, so it was critical to make sure that wasn’t apparent.’

Once picture was locked, the post crew took the edit decision list from the Avid over to Complete Post for the online.

‘We couldn’t online 480p – the only way we could deal with it was by upconverting to the high-def standards already supported by facilities,’ Pereira notes.

The Tortilla Soup footage was thus upconverted to 1080I/30. While the one-week online proceeded, Complete Post color-corrected finished reels on a da Vinci 2K. Some scenes were imported into a fire, Discreet’s HD-enabled editing and effects system, for optical and effects work. Picture was then turned into a digital data stream on DLT tape and brought cross-town to CFI Labs for the 35mm transfer.

Perhaps the biggest advantage of posting in HD is the ability to perform a wider range of picture enhancements than would be available in the photochemical domain.

‘It allowed the DOP and director to make creative lighting decisions after the fact,’ Pereira says.

But although moviemakers posting digitally can bring the look of a movie very close to what they want, they still need to do traditional timing if doing a 35mm transfer.

‘We’ve still got variables to contend with, including the chemical bath and the film stock [for printing],’ Pereira explains.

In terms of writing out to film, Pereira and his colleagues compared an Arri Laser cine film recorder against the equivalent from Celco.

‘The results that came from the Arri were much colder than the Celco, which had more of a grain texture and provided a warm quality to the image, which is why I decided to go with that technology,’ he says.

Most reviews of the film don’t call attention to the fact that Tortilla Soup was digitally originated and posted, which no doubt suits the producers fine. However, an otherwise favorable write-up on all-reviews.com does refer to the movie’s ‘grainy cinematography.’

Pereira believes that despite a lot of current debate in the industry, film and video can have a happy marriage.

‘These days there are a lot of ways of making a movie,’ he says. ‘You can do an exclusively digital movie projected in a digital theatre; you can shoot 35mm, deal with a digital intermediate and then go back out to 35mm; or you can shoot digitally, post digitally, and then go out to 35mm. I see a lot of promise in these methods.’

Having spent time in L.A. helping pioneer digital-to-film processes, Pereira has returned to Toronto and likes what he sees at local post facilities.

‘I’ve been very impressed with how they’ve embraced [HD] and how they’ve been willing to experiment,’ he notes. ‘They’ve pretty much kept pace with what Los Angeles facilities have been doing.’

Toronto-based Stonehenge is one of the shops at the forefront of HD posting. The company purchased the Sony 1080I/24p HD post system because, as president Glyn Evans says, ‘The world is going to gravitate towards high-def, no matter what the roadblocks.’

Evans sees HD’s breakthrough event as the launch of Sony’s 24p HDW-F900 camcorder. Although a more expensive production alternative than Panasonic 480p, the Sony HDCAM’s film-like 24 fps capture rate and traditional 180-degree shuttering allow for a smooth video-to-film transfer. Evans sees 24p as the ultimate mastering format, crucial in an ever-globalizing marketplace.

‘Once you’ve mastered to 24p, you can make your direct dub to PAL [the European broadcast standard], NTSC 4:3, and HD 16:9 – you can go anywhere with that format,’ he says.

Evans says Stonehenge’s HD gear and expertise have brought in many new clients, including some from the northern U.S., where he sees 24p resources as currently limited. Among the HD features Stonehenge has worked on in varying capacities are Danforth Studios’ Drop Dead Roses, Silverthorn Pictures’ The Happy Couple and Willow Pictures’ Rub & Tug. In the TV realm it performed online in 1080I/30 on season one of Good Earth Productions’ Great Canadian Rivers and in 24p on Stuart Samuels Productions’ Urban Wild.

Stonehenge uses Nothing Real’s Shake compositing tool for effects in 24p, along with Softimage|DS. The shop obviously has a vested interest in spreading the 24p gospel, and has coordinated seminars with The Female Eye film festival and Sony. As far as his staff goes, Evans says it has almost completely negotiated the Sony system’s learning curve.

‘There are still inevitable issues that come up, such as ‘Are you recording at 24 fps or 23.98?’ and ‘If you record the sound at 25 frames [PAL format] and you’ve got picture at 23.98, how do you sync the two together?’ ‘ he notes.

To avoid such confusion, Vancouver’s Post Digital Works, which rents Sony CineAlta HDCAMs and offers HD post gear and services, recommends its clients originate in 25p PAL.

‘We have PAL systems inside the house, and there’s a well-established post path for PAL already, because more than half the world uses it,’ explains Post Digital Works president Brian Hammond. ‘You don’t run into those audio issues. [Otherwise] you have to use film-based synchronizers, which are quite expensive.’

Hammond admits Post Digital Works’ initial foray into HD nearly two years ago came with some growing pains.

‘For the first eight months the machinery wasn’t very reliable, and we also [had difficulty] trying to get the signals downconverted so that we could work with them in Betacam and VHS for offlines,’ he explains. ‘There were a lot of revisions to the cameras and machines, and we’ve only really felt confident everything would go smoothly since the beginning of last year.’

Post Digital Works has a dozen Avids, including the Symphony 24p/25p-enabled finishing system and the Avid Unity, a network that allows simultaneous file sharing among seven Media Composers and Film Composers. The system is currently being used on location on The WB’s forthcoming answer to Survivor, titled No Boundaries. Although so far the shop has been downconverting footage from HD for standard-definition finishing, it is looking at an Avid|DS for finishing in HD.

In addition to the fact that few consumers have HD sets at home, finishing in HD remains prohibitively expensive for most producers.

‘It’s more costly to do effects and compositing in HD, to a factor of about two-and-a-half times,’ Hammond says.

According to Stonehenge’s Evans, technical problems have arisen due to insufficient communication between production and post.

‘We had clients going out and shooting stuff without even talking to our guys, and [then coming back and saying] ‘There’s a problem, this isn’t right,’ ‘ he recounts. ‘Now everybody has to sit down and have a conversation beforehand, because the rules are slightly different.’

-www.stonehenge.ca

-www.post-digitalworks.com